Josh Mack blogging at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts, and occasionally on; bicycles, politics, Brooklyn, parenting, crafts, and good reading. Currently helping to build a new NYC neighborhood news site - nearsay.com, that celebrates the voices that make our city. Subscribe to the daily newsletter it gives you what you need to know.

December 31, 2005

We are making some last minute donations for the year and found an interesting thing on the Doctors Without Borders donation page. Their "title" category extends way beyond the standard Mr., Mrs, Dr. to such things as Brigadier General, Deacon, and our favorite for the day, The Emperor and Empress of...

December 30, 2005

TechCrunch's list of 2.0 companies he (Michael Arrington) couldn't live without.
Pew study on Internet usage of men and women. (via HuffingtonPost.com
Type in your zipcode + .com in a browser. Chances are it is being sat on by a company.

December 27, 2005

I love this time of year for reading both top lists and predictions of the coming year. Fred Wilson has an excellent series of posts called Predicting the Future which has some great ideas and I expect most of them will be covered in some shape or form next year. It also links to Calcanis's predidictions who in turn links to Dave Winer, and Battelle. Start with Fred's...

December 24, 2005

PaidContent has a post about Google's right to sell their new stake in AOL in July of 2008. So does the NYT. The companies say this is standard language in such an agreement, I have no idea but think it is interesting nonetheless.

December 23, 2005

David McCullough tours some of NYC Revolutionary War sites in the NYT.

"I was speaking in Vienna and then brought out one of the earliestdrawings ever made of New York," Mr. McCullough said. "It was somehouses and a dock for boats. And I looked at the drawing of that littleplace and thought not just of the history that would take place there,but of all the music that will be played there, the books that will bewritten there, the poetry, drama and the architecture that will comefrom there. There will be no city like it on earth."

Glass shape affects the size of drinks that get poured into them. Turns out that people put more whiskey into short glasses than tall ones.

I just downloaded and installed performancing's firefox editing extension and I'm using it for this post. In the about section for the extension I found this article about buying blogs and how to value them.

December 22, 2005

A fun experience watching Rocketboom while listening to the Mayor's droning press-conference about the end of the strike. Aural multi-tasking in stereo.Now do your part to keep the city humming. Stop reading this and go shop!

December 21, 2005

The Times has launched a new feature of people's transit strike stories. It puts a custom icons on a Google Map with the stories in the info window. This is on top of the real estate blog they launched earlier in the week. And on top of that they finally printed the story they were sitting on for a year. Cool.

Jason Kottke has a nice post about the fact that blog search still has a way to go. It involves Freakonomics + the fact that he mentioned it 13 times last year and not one of those mentions is cited in the 125 blogs that the Times refers to...

December 20, 2005

Article on sensible forms in A list Apart. MicroPersuassion reports on a firefox blogging plugin .Interesting speculation on TalkingPointsMemo about Sen. Rockefeller's note to Cheney and what the technology he refers to is. Are our e-mails being read?

Today's transit strike reminds me of the old doorman strikes we used to have. When that would happen everyone would form committee's take on Garbage, entry etc. This could be translated to the subway system. For instance who among us wouldn't want to drive a train for a little while? Oh well back out into the cold on my bike.

December 15, 2005

I received this great piece of Nigerian style money scam earlier
today. How did they know I was an Anglophile? I won't be responding to this so if you want feel free. He suffered a "ghastly
accident" read on;

In order to transfer out (USD 12.6 M) Twelve million Six Hundred United States Dollars) from National Westminster Bank uk. I have the courage to ask you if you are capable,reliable and honest to assist us with this important business believing that you will never let me down either now or in future. I am Mrs. Nancy Brooks, the Chief Auditor of National Westminster Bank uk (NATWEST BANK). There is an account opened in this bank by Mr Smith B Andreas and since then nobody has operated on this account again. After goingthrough some old files in the records, I discovered that if I do not remit this money out urgently,it would be forfeited for nothing.Smith Andreas, a foreigner,and a miner at kruger gold co., a geologist by profession, died in a ghastly motor accident....

December 13, 2005

The Guardian which is I think consistantly the best example of of 2.0 thinking and media (see their Travel Section, newsblog, zeitgeist, etc.) also has a fun side. They have launched a ever growing photogallery of office holiday decor.

This morning I attended a few sessions of the Knowing the World Through Sound Symposium at NYU. I wanted to see the first panel about the New York SoundMap that is being created by the NY Chapter of the American Society for Acoustic Ecology. The* NY Sound Map is a Google map mashup which links to audio clips of sound recorded in the urban environment. Nice start. They handed out a great list urban audio ecology projects that I've listed below. It really opened my ears to what a vast field and way of thinking. some people map decibel levels, others through soundwalks create more meditative experiences. The work below has already made me broaden some of the audio ideas I'm playing with. Some of the links below are very academic in nature. Ones with *'s seem to approach more of what I'm interested in.